Quotes

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.